Friday, April 20, 2012

Free App Friday: Four for Free

What's better than one free App on Friday?  How about four free apps! All are simple to use for early elementary and pre-K grades.  




Long Vowels is a fun app for students to learn and practice phonics by piloting a spaceship and shooting at planets to identify each word that has a long vowel sound.


Applications for Education: By identifying words, this app helps students recognize common word patterns. They also will begin to understand how the initial consonant, middle vowels, and ending consonant affect pronunciation.






Little Writer is an simple but fun app that allows students to trace letters, numbers, words, and shapes. If the student traces correctly along the lines, they can collect items as prizes.  The app includes upper and lower case letters, numbers 1-10, basic shapes, and 3-4 letter words.


Applications for Education: Letter tracing is an important skill for beginning readers to master by helping the development of letter recognition and fine motor control. 








 Hungry Fish is an extremely fun app that helps students master addition skills.  By tapping or dragging number bubbles together to add up to the number on the fish, students will "feed" their very hungry fish. The surrounding sea life will blow out new bubbles for students to continue to add together to feed the fish. 


Applications for Education:  Students will develop fast mental addition skills as well as learning multiple ways to add up each sum. 









WR (What Rhymes) is a great visual and auditory app that lets students match rhyming words.  After the the question of "What rhyme with..." is read aloud, students tap the image that rhymes with the corresponding word from a bank of four images.  Once the correct word image has been chosen, students are asked what else rhymes with that particular word.  Additional rhyming words are then read aloud by tapping below the images.  


Applications for Education:  Teaching rhyming words (which is a basic component of phonics) in preschool and kindergarten can help build a base for reading comprehension later on. Also a great app for speech pathologists. 



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